PSZRI is the complete collection of legislation of the Russian Empire and is considered one of the most monumental collections in Russian imperial law. The collection is arranged in chronological order and should not be confused with Polnyĭ svod zakonov Rossiĭskoĭ imperii, a 16-volume set of laws published in 1911, in which many of the laws were systematically consolidated into topical codes rather than in chronological order.

As part of the project designed to establish the NationalDigital Library in Russia, NLR enriched its library by digitizing the Complete Collection of the Laws of the Russian Empire. Currently, all readers have open-access to the complete texts of the first, second and third collections. Comments and suggestions on the use of this resource can be sent to the NLR webmaster.